Quotes By Theodor Adorno

If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.

If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

There is no love that is not an echo.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he has left to live as a brief reprieve.

The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain, disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday.

All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Intelligence is a moral category.

The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the credit.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.